President Donald Trump should move to block U.S.-based pension funds from investing in Chinese equities, said Frank Gaffney, executive chairman and founder of the Center for Security Policy, following the president’s order on Monday to halt a government-administered retirement savings program from basing its investments on index including Chinese firms.
American companies should not invest pension funds for their retirees in Chinese firms, said Gaffney in an interview on Wednesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.
Gaffney praised Trump’s decision to block the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board’s (FRTIB) mirroring of the Morgan Stanley Capital International’s (MSCI) World Index, a global stock listing including China-based companies. FRTIB administer the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP), a defined contribution plan for federal employees and military personnel.
“The language that was used to describe why that money mustn’t move into Chinese Communist Party companies applies much more broadly to the funds that Wall Street has been busily pushing from our capital markets — our stock and bond markets — into Chinese companies for years,” Gaffney stated. “So this tees up the next big challenge and … that is to stop underwriting the Chinese Communist Party more generally.”
U.S.-based pension funds investing in Chinese interests compromise national security, warned Gaffney.
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FRTIB’s investment in Chinese stocks as part of its administration of retirement funds on behalf of U.S. military servicepersons is untoward, said Gaffney in March, estimating that approximately $3 trillion dollars had been transferred to China via U.S.-based retirement instruments.
Gaffney warned, “American military veterans and active personnel are being put in the position [where] they will shortly be compelled to invest their money — their retirement funds — in the companies that are trying to help the Chinese Communist Party being positioned to kill them. It’s obscene.”
China’s regulatory framework for securities is insufficient when compared with American standards for transparency, added Gaffney. Americans’ financial welfare is at risk when their pension funds involve investment in China, he added.
Gaffney repeated his call for a broader application of the Trump administration’s directive to FRTIB to include pension funds managed by Wall Street’s financial firms:
The message [the Trump administration] collectively sent to the board that manages the Thrift Savings Plan could not have been more clear: Chinese companies are unacceptably risky. Some enable malevolent CCP activities that repress the Chinese people and threaten ours. And none conform to our nation’s requirements for transparency, accountability and disclosure.
The Gipper’s worthy successor, Donald Trump, has sent a powerful message to Beijing. And Wall Street is on notice, too.
Breitbart News was essential in bringing attention to U.S. retirement funds’ investment in Chinese companies, assessed Gaffney.
“The Breitbart team deserves a lot of the credit, because I think what prompted the president to get engaged on this no-brainer — as he put it — is that he heard from the American people — as well as from some of us in Washington, in the military, and in former government life — whose own retirement funds were on the line,” said Gaffney.
“Of course, we don’t want the monies of our men and women in uniform and our civilian government employees to be going into Chinese Communist Party companies that are involved in a whole host of activities that threaten us, and in some cases oppress the people of China,” Gaffney added.
Gaffney concluded, “It took some serious effort and, I think this is where the vox populi ultimately was indispensable to get the message to the president and to get this issue in front of him. Once it got there, he responded absolutely appropriately,” Gaffney concluded.
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